MSI Computers commonly known for reliability and mainstream motherboards. Now they have shifted focus from the mainstream to the high end with hopes to take over the gaming market with both motherboards and notebooks.

The GT70 is for lack of a better word “Astounding” Full 17.3” Matte Display, Backlit SteelSeries Keyboard, “Super Raid”, Bigfoot Gaming Lan, Built in Audio boost. The GT70 is designed with the belief in holding nothing back and being geared to the top gaming contender on the score board.

MSI designed this beast to not only match, but destroy the Alienware M17x and Asus G75, were they successful? Did they utterly destroy them or did they trade blows where it counts? Only time will tell.

Msi has provided me with a GT70 for a very short term to test. Unlike most reviewers I work 2 jobs and have a family to work around. This is my first Notebook review and more than likely last. Where my reviews differ from the norm is my introduction and conclusion are both at the beginning as these are more often than not the most important pages to myself.

Conclusion

The MSI GT70 is a tank, with extreme power on its side it can and will wow any gaming fan, out of the box loaded with bloatware and odd wireless quirks, these issues are quickly overcome and the true beauty of this machine shines through.

Very silent operation, even at the hottest of times and extreme gaming the fans never get obnoxiously loud

Out of the box maxed out specs

16gb of ram and Raid 0 make it extremely fast backed with a intel i7 3610m and 670m 3GB DDR5

Matte 1080P display gives you great viewing inside and out.

Beautifully backlit keyboard with thousands of color choices.

Cons

Heat, that one little word is a deal breaker for myself. The system will heat up a small area even idling, the moment you start to game the system sits at 70c+ and anyone to the left of you will be sweating.

Sound, the mids and highs are amazing where the bass/lows are very lacking

Battery life, in gaming with full brightness I was only able to get 55 minutes from 100%-5% and sitting with half brightness the system gets a total of 4 hours battery life doing nothing but idling

Idle temps seem high 50c is the norm for this system where it seldom goes below 50c even on when just doing word

Wireless card being turned off by default on every start up

A Closer lookVery nice packaging and branding

Very Stylish backpack. Mug not included

Very nice combination of metal and plastic to show even better build quality then the Asus G series or any AlienWare Notebook on the Market

Triple USB 3.0 as well as Multifunction card Reader and 5.1 3.5mm with built in amp and gold leads.

Dual USB 2.0 and BD Combo Drive

Back of the GT70 Sports the Charging port, Gigabit Ethernet, SVGA,ESata and HDMI with Audio. As well as the GPU Exhaust Vent.

Very easy access to all internals for upgrades, Dual 1.8’ Mini PCIE SSD’s and a 750GB 7200rpm Sata II Data drive. Note the Fan is about the easiest fan to remove I have ever witnessed and it’s amazingly easy to clean.

Beautifully well-made heat spreaders much stronger than commonly seen on gaming notebooks.

Hands on Testing and Results

Out of the box the system is extremely fast with boot times of less than 30 seconds till windows and all applications are loaded and 10 seconds from gaming to shut down. 4 Cores and 8 Thread Paths leaves you with no need to upgrade for a long time. The i7-3610m idles at 1.1Ghz and when needed cranks up to 3.1Ghz. The ondie Intel 4000 is strictly for battery saving and even shows small glitches and slowdowns when switching back up to the 670m, on the attempt to disable the default HD 4000 the system blue screened. So for testing purposes I was able to use both the 4000 and 670m on a few benchmarks.

Windows index leaves the GT70’s minimum score on the GPU at 7.2 but in the real world the 670M more than holds its own.

Test one
PCMark7 The Intel Card BSODed every attempt to run but the Nvidia Card got a nice 4671.

Test Two
3DMark 2011, Intel with a P717 and Nvidia 670m P2997

Test Three
3DMark Vantage, Intel with a P3908 and Nvidia 670m P12,487

Quick test of the SSD raid shows a very fast internal raid array but on testing the spinning disk data drive shows that without the raid setup the system is not anything out of the normal.

First Day Hands On
The first day using the GT70 I noticed the following features. A extremely lacking bios with no overclocking features and not a whole lot of anything.

After playing with or more or less just looking at the bios I moved onto the first startup. Out of the box the system was loaded with French Windows 7 a very quick fix by clicking English in the setup. After the 30 seconds of entering the systems name we were onto the setting up desktop screen. At this screen the system held for over 5 minutes so do not restart if it seems longer than normal, this is due to the MSI software prepping in the back ground.The Msi Software screen, this is a great improvement for any company to let the End User decide what they want and don’t want before hitting the Windows screen.

Once all the windows updates were done (2 hours later on a 50mb connection) I tested the startup and shut down speeds. From full powered down state to all apps loaded 25-32 seconds, from gaming till power down 7-12 seconds. Very fast shut downs and startups leave you with the feeling of money well spent.

Last Thoughts on the GT70

For almost 3 years now I have worked as a close partner to Asus and Apple, leaving me with a closed mind to the rest of the world. After trying the MSI GT70 I have to say I have never been more impressed with a gaming laptop. The GXX from Asus always lacked stable drivers and build quality, The GT70 makes up for this in every way. The build quality and ease of access to all the internals is like nothing I have ever seen before. Thank god to the MSI team for putting a normal GPU that takes any driver Nvidia throws at it. The Keyboard LED’s are unreal and make it feel like your computer is having its own mini pyrotechnics show at night. The Raid setup is extremely fast and leaves very little to be desired in the way of an aftermarket upgrade.
The only major issues I found with the GT70 was the unstable Intel HD4000, which we hope will be ironed out with driver updates in the future and in the gaming words does not affect the user in any way.

The quirky wireless card is another issue where 50% of the time when you turn the computer on it is disabled and has to be enabled by hitting the connectivity key on the top of the keyboard.

Lastly the heat on this system though it is extreme in the high 70c the system never shuts down or shows signs of trouble. The only down side you get from this is everything to the left of the computer is going to sweat. A plus side to this is it will keep your coffee hot for hours.

I would like to end by thanking MSI for the opportunity to try this master piece out and would like to thank them for opening my eyes. At its higher price point for the maxed out model matching the G75 from Asus at a similar price point I found the GT70 to be the winner for value and power.

If you are in the market for that long term desktop replacement look no further than the MSI GT70 and you will never be disappointed.

I'm currently looking for a new laptop that needs some horsepower as well as 2 hard drives. This one was on my list as well as the Asus G75VW and the Samsung NP700G7C (Series 7 17.3" - OVERVIEW | SAMSUNG). How does the MSI compare to the others?